Chapter 1: IP as an asset class
IP: The world's largest intangible asset category
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes major industries, intellectual property (IP) is expected to become a core asset that drives the rapid development of AI.
According to the 2023 Global Intangible Asset Tracking Report released by Brand Finance , IP is regarded as the world's largest asset class, with a total value of more than 61.9 trillion US dollars, covering technology, finance, research and development, scientific innovation and other fields. From code bases and data to scientific research and inventions, these can all be classified as IP assets.
However, IP transactions and ownership have long been monopolized by a few market giants. Complex registration and protection processes, high legal costs, and fragmentation across jurisdictions make it difficult for broader market participation.
At the same time, IP holders of all kinds, from individuals to large multinational corporations, are faced with challenges in how to effectively monetize or divide their IP, which results in a large number of intangible assets being illiquid and unable to fully realize their potential value.
This is exactly the problem Story aims to solve. Story is committed to putting IP on the blockchain, changing the way IP is financed and monetized, and transforming intangible assets into programmable tools to generate revenue from multiple revenue channels, whether for AI training and reasoning, or other emerging sources of demand.
As one of the first blockchain projects to work with top AI companies, Story has established a partnership with Stability AI, which developed Stable Diffusion, and demonstrated how on-chain IP assets can be seamlessly integrated into AI systems.
This report will explore the challenges facing the traditional IP model in the AI era and detail how Story leverages its technology infrastructure, legal framework and partner ecosystem to unlock new opportunities for IP creators, businesses, institutions and investors.
In the AI era, IP value rises
In an era dominated by AI, the value of IP is becoming increasingly prominent. AI model training relies on massive amounts of text, images, videos, and a variety of data, while proprietary data and domain-specific data for real-time analysis and specific tasks are also essential in the inference stage.
Therefore, all sources that provide data for AI can be classified as IP assets, such as news aggregation, quantitative research, financial data, user-generated content, etc.
Story’s early collaboration with Stability AI, a leading global open source AI development company, provides a concrete example of the combination of on-chain IP assets and AI.
This collaboration allows IP to be directly integrated into the inference layer of AI models. Output generated through Stable Diffusion can be automatically registered on Story and tokenized into on-chain IP assets in real time.
This collaboration demonstrates the possibility of seamlessly registering AI-generated content as IP, ensuring its ownership verification and traceability on the blockchain.
The ultimate goal of this collaboration is to build a globally accessible, screened on-chain database. By proactively promoting the tokenization of AI-generated content, Story enables Stability AI, and the broader AI ecosystem, to generate licensed on-chain content in batches, while providing a transparent revenue distribution mechanism for IP holders.
As AIGC continues to expand, exporting models and seamlessly registering them as IPs can bring massive amounts of new data to the on-chain ecosystem. In the long run, this will promote the popularity of tokenized IPs and create more opportunities for ownership, signature rights, and monetization.
As computing power has gradually been commoditized, the core competitiveness of AI models has shifted from computing power to data and IP.
Without continuous access to high-quality data and IP throughout the lifecycle of an AI system, even the most advanced models will struggle to remain competitive or achieve breakthroughs. This further reinforces the view that “AI needs data” and that IP will become as critical to the development of AI as dedicated computing hardware once was.
However, in the AI era, IP asset holders are facing unprecedented risks. When AI models use their IP without authorization, the copyright income or attribution rights that the IP asset holders deserve will be deprived, especially small IP holders with limited resources, who often lack the resources or support needed to protect their rights.
Once data is crawled, mixed, or input into AI workflows, traditional rights protection methods are almost ineffective because IP assets will be aggregated, converted, or anonymized in the complex layered architecture of AI training and reasoning, making tracing almost impossible.
On the other hand, this challenge not only affects small IP holders, but even large IP holders face similar dilemmas.
Although they have huge IP assets, the current IP legal system remains rigid and fragmented, unable to support the monetization or distribution of IP in a more flexible, programmable and scalable manner, especially as AI needs become increasingly dynamic and modular.
IP Infrastructure in the AI Era: Never Been More Important
Although still in its early stages of development, generative AI (such as Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, and ChatGPT) has completely subverted the way humans produce, from programming, data analysis, to text and image creation, almost everywhere. The training of these AI systems relies on massive amounts of data from around the world.
According to a report by Grand View Research , the global AI training database market is valued at $2.6 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% from 2025 to 2030.
Similarly, Fortune Business Insights predicts that the market will grow at a CAGR of 24.7% during the forecast period to reach $17 billion by 2032.
However, as the AI training data market expands, a key issue needs to be resolved: How to define the ownership and authorship of data? Can data contributors receive reasonable compensation?
Currently, AIGC faces a legal and ethical gray area due to the following reasons:
Large Language Models (LLMs) may enable unauthorized reuse of copyrighted text;
Image-generating AI could copy an artist’s unique style without permission or compensation.
Without a sound digital IP infrastructure, AI development may go to two extremes:
Tragedy of the Commons: If IP is occupied without compensation, innovators will lack incentives, leading to a decline in their willingness to create, and the entire industry will fall into a downturn.
The AI arms race intensifies: Only large companies with strong financial resources can cope with the increasingly complex IP litigation and legal disputes, and small and medium-sized innovators are gradually marginalized.
The concept of overgrazing vividly describes the situation in which AI systems plunder human creative content without taking due responsibility, and ultimately the driving force for innovation gradually dries up due to lack of incentives.
TCP/IP for AI Agents
As important as the concept of “overgrazing” is, AI’s capabilities are rapidly expanding beyond simple text and image generation to complex machine-to-machine interactions, making the traditional human-centric legal framework outdated and inadequate.
As agent-based AI systems become increasingly intelligent, they increasingly collaborate and exchange knowledge directly with each other. In this changing era, every piece of data, skill, or insight generated or consumed by an AI agent can be considered IP.
Agents may exchange optimized algorithms, specialized codes, training data, and even specific task solutions. Since these assets are completely digital and can be copied or transformed instantly, AI agents urgently need a sound, automated, and programmable IP trading framework to efficiently manage the creation, use, and trading of IP.
However, traditional IP systems rely on manual contracts and slow legal processes and cannot cope with the pace of this emerging trading model. This further requires a programmable IP framework to manage commercial agreements between agents, facilitate seamless monetary transactions, and provide a reliable and scalable alternative to traditional methods.
Although AI agents have the ability to trade vast amounts of expertise in real time, there are currently no recognized standards for how to negotiate and trade these intangible IP assets. This lack not only increases development costs, but also creates compliance risks and leaves a huge gap in trust and commercialization mechanisms.
That's why Story developed Agent TCP/IP.
Agent TCP/IP is an open source framework that allows AI agents to autonomously negotiate, manage, and trade their IP assets in the same way that the Internet communicates over TCP/IP.
Through Agent TCP/IP, AI agents can:
Verify each other's IP licensing terms
Automate payments and transactions
Enforcing copyright and use restrictions
Ensure IP contributors are fairly rewarded
Currently, multiple AI agent systems have integrated Agent TCP/IP directly into their core frameworks, including Eliza from ai16z, GAME from Virtuals, GOAT from Crossmint, and ZerePy from Zerebro. Recently, Virtuals' AI agent Luna even used Agent TCP/IP to publicly negotiate IP licensing with another AI agent DaVinci on social media X (formerly Twitter).
In the future, the development of AI will increasingly rely on high-quality IP assets. However, traditional IP laws and regulations mainly focus on "copying" and are difficult to adapt to the needs of the AI era, especially:
How to define ownership of the massive amount of derivative works generated by AI?
How to ensure copyright compliance when using AI training data?
How to efficiently implement the Micro-Licensing mechanism for data?
In this context, IP acquisition and authorization have surpassed computing hardware and become a key bottleneck in the development of AI. AI models must constantly acquire new IP assets to maintain competitiveness and innovation. All of this can be efficiently managed and optimized through the blockchain infrastructure provided by Story.
Tokenized IP in the Digital Economy
DeFi (DeFi) introduces the concept of "programmable money", that is, tokenized assets on the blockchain can interact freely in an ecosystem consisting of composable financial protocols. Once an asset is tokenized on the chain, it can be connected to the entire network and realize a series of value-added services.
By tokenizing IP and bringing it onto the chain, IP evolves from a static off-chain asset to a programmable on-chain asset, making IP programmable, which will bring unprecedented possibilities.
Just as the Internet and social media have significantly reduced the cost of copying and distributing information - and thereby spawned entirely new market models - on-chain IP frameworks also reduce the operational costs of IP licensing and royalty management. By tokenizing IP and defining licensing terms in on-chain modules, IP holders can achieve composable, legally protected uses in a low-friction market environment. At the same time, royalty payments that were previously delayed due to manual negotiations can now circulate autonomously on-chain, giving rise to entirely new business models - models that were difficult to achieve under the traditional IP system.
Additionally, AI developers can quickly verify the terms of use for a specific IP and legally reuse IP assets in their modules through micropayments.
Under this system, both large-scale IP organizations and independent creators can contribute IP fairly and gain benefits.
The ownership traceability information of IP is completely verifiable, which eliminates unnecessary verification and cumbersome negotiation processes. The process of AI using IP assets is no longer a zero-sum game, but a virtuous cycle of sustainable growth. Once an IP asset is tokenized, it obtains a complete digital tool, which brings it the characteristics of transferability, tradability and revenue sharing.
More importantly, when the AI agent reads data from a blockchain-based IP registry, it can automatically confirm whether a database or asset is available for commercial use, verify AI training permissions, initiate payments on the chain, and store an immutable transaction record.
This is the core of the Agent TCP/IP concept - enabling AI to interpret IP in code under a universal communication protocol. IP no longer disappears into the opaque AI training data pool, but becomes an asset that can be continuously tracked, and its usage, royalty income and derivative content can be recorded in real time.
In this model, IP holders can allow AI models to learn their works while retaining supervision rights and obtaining reasonable compensation. In the Web2 era, large-scale "crawling" of content often prevents IP holders from receiving due compensation, but programmable IP transforms this process into a collaborative, win-win, value-driven market.
Exponential Growth of AI-Generated Content and Data
AI is still in a relatively early stage of development, but it is already enabling content production at an unprecedented scale.
The most intuitive example is the explosion of generative AI - from Grok from X (formerly Twitter), to Stable Diffusion from Stability AI in collaboration with Story, to ChatGPT from OpenAI and Claude from Anthropic, these large language models (LLMs) are able to generate complex images or long content through simple text input.
However, the influx of massive content and oversaturation of the market may lead to the dilution of the value of original works.
If there is a lack of infrastructure to track the hierarchical relationships between IP derivative works, or if there is no way to ensure that derivative works provide reasonable compensation to the original creators, then the devaluation of AI-driven content is inevitable.
Therefore, we need to establish a new IP architecture to coordinate the interests of all parties and build a fair and open environment for collaboration between humans and AI.
By converting IP into a liquid and composable tokenized asset, it can be ensured that the production speed and generation capacity of AI will not infringe on the legitimate rights and interests of the original creator. This model can guide the exponentially growing AI output from "disorderly plunder" to "cooperative win-win", allowing innovators, developers and IP holders to share the dividends brought by AI transformation.
Chapter 2: Story——IP Blockchain in the AI Economy
Core infrastructure for AI data
As AI advances at an unprecedented pace, the demand for high-quality data and IP assets is surging in tandem.
Story is addressing the inefficiencies in the traditional IP system - fragmented ownership, lack of enforceable licensing mechanisms, and opaque ownership, which have become major obstacles to IP monetization and innovation.
By establishing a blockchain-based IP asset repository, Story aims to become the core infrastructure in the AI economy, making "programmable IP" a reality and achieving fair sharing and utilization of IP resources between humans and AI agents.
Story uses an execution environment similar to Ethereum and introduces a legal framework for programmable IP licenses, allowing various IP assets to be combined with AI technology to provide high-quality knowledge input for AI.
For large IP holders, Story's on-chain repository enables them to efficiently manage large IP asset portfolios and automate the authorization and monetization of IP assets. For example, AI developers can automatically obtain the right to use specific IP resources through preset smart contracts and ensure strict execution of contract terms.
For small and medium-sized IP holders, Story provides a global marketplace that enables them to tokenize and commercialize IP assets and ensure that their IP usage terms are readable and enforceable, effectively protecting their rights from infringement.
In short, IP will become the “digital gold” of the AI era, and Story will use its unique blockchain environment and carefully designed legal framework to realize this vision.
Story’s financing and market recognition
Story's potential has been recognized by top investment institutions, who are optimistic about the transformational power of the combination of blockchain and AI in the IP industry. Since its establishment, Story has completed multiple rounds of financing, raising a total of more than $140 million. After the latest round of financing, its valuation reached $2.25 billion, which shows the market's confidence in its model and growth prospects.
Story’s seed round was led by a16z Crypto and supported by Samsung’s NEXT Q Fund, which focuses on investing in AI startups.
The subsequent financing round was also led by a16z Crypto, attracting top institutions such as Polychain Capital, Foresight Ventures, and Nomad Capital. In addition, Story has also won the favor of a group of angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan, Charlie Songhurst, Scott Trowbridge, head of Stability AI, and Paris Hilton. At the same time, Korean entertainment industry giants such as Hybe founder Bang Si Hyuk and The Black Label CEO Jung Kyung In also joined the investment ranks.
Source: The Block Pro Research
Story is one of the eight projects in which a16z Crypto has participated in at least three rounds of financing, which also demonstrates a16z's high recognition of its prospects.
Source: The Block Pro Research
It is worth noting that Story is the only blockchain project that a16z Crypto has led three consecutive rounds of investment. Across all industries, a16z’s “three consecutive rounds” are extremely rare, and our research shows that this situation is unprecedented in blockchain projects.
Strong financial support, coupled with strategic guidance from top venture capital firms, investment funds and industry leaders in the crypto and AI fields, further consolidates Story's leading position in the IP field. Story gives IP holders new tools to stay competitive in the rapidly developing AI economy.
Story has also successfully completed one of the largest financings in the crypto industry, which not only reflects the market's growing recognition of IP as a key asset class, but also demonstrates Story's innovative potential in the IP trading market - it is breaking the industry's long-standing inefficiencies and providing global IP holders with new monetization opportunities.
Story's headquarters and global presence
The Story team was born in Silicon Valley and is currently headquartered in Palo Alto, California, just minutes away from Stanford University and a few steps away from the headquarters of Aptos and Sui. The dense concentration of technical talents gathered here makes this area the "L1 Valley".
This geographical location not only ensures that Story is always at the forefront of blockchain and AI development, but also enables it to attract top technical talent and maintain close connections with venture capital institutions and global AI leaders.
In addition, Story adopts a global remote working model and attracts outstanding talents from all over the world to ensure that it can penetrate different markets and enhance its service capabilities in various industries and communities.
Definition of Story
Story is a purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain dedicated to putting IP assets on-chain, making them programmable and composable, just like DeFi makes financial assets programmable.
As a "world-class IP blockchain", Story integrates the underlying architecture of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and performs targeted optimizations.
These adjustments are designed to handle complex relationships in the IP Graph, such as tracing the chain of title and resolving the relationship between derived IP assets and parent IP assets in the IP Graph.
In essence, Story is a protocol suite around the tokenization of IP assets, consisting of three core components:
Story L1 Blockchain Network
Proof-of-Creativity (PoC) Protocol
Programmable IP License (PIL)
Source: The Block Pro Research
These core components together build a complete programmable IP ecosystem, covering key aspects such as IP tokenization, revenue and royalty distribution.
We will delve into the technical details of each component in subsequent chapters.
Programmable IP
In the Story ecosystem, IP assets tokenized by Story are essentially ERC-721 tokens with special token-bound accounts. Unlike traditional NFTs that are only linked to a file, Story's IP assets contain detailed IP metadata and are embedded with modules that define usage conditions. This allows tokenized IP assets to automatically perform the following functions through programming:
Allow or restrict the creation of derivative works and set licensing conditions and profit distribution rules;
The royalty income among multiple co-holders of parent IP assets can be automatically distributed according to smart contracts;
Ensure that the commercial use of AI models or platforms complies with the pre-set licensing terms;
Let IP asset holders decide whether to open their data for AI training;
Track the property rights chain of IP assets and record their evolution path and derivative works.
Once the IP asset is minted, it has an embedded API that can interact with dApps or AI services, simplifying the authorization process and promoting the development of the AIGC and UGC ecosystem.
This model can promote collaborative innovation in various industries, from music distribution to AI model training data, from meme generation to brand licensing, and so on.
Story as an IP asset center in the AI era
Unlike general-purpose blockchains, Story is designed with the needs of AI in mind. By providing a single on-chain repository of tokenized IP assets:
AI developers can easily discover and license curated databases for AI model training, ranging from images, text corpora, and even entire virtual worlds, without having to manually negotiate with each IP holder.
This capability is not limited to simple AI model training, but can also be used for specific purposes such as quantitative research or interactions between AI agents.
Whenever an IP asset is accessed, minted or derived, its rights holder will automatically receive royalty income, thereby reducing transaction friction and providing real-time record of ownership.
Large studios or data providers can integrate their IP assets on Story to simplify the licensing process across chains, platforms or jurisdictions.
In the future, Story can even develop into a global AI data market, where IP asset holders can provide data to AI developers and obtain stable on-chain royalty income.
With the help of the Programmable IP License (PIL) mechanism, the world's largest companies can trust that their IP assets have sufficiently secure licensing protections and can easily track and verify the use of their IP assets.
The collaboration between Story and Stability AI is a real-life example of this vision.
As a developer of open source AI models, Stability AI needs to continuously access licensed data streams. By engaging global database providers and individual IP holders, Story has built a transparent market for Stability AI and other AI company developers, where they can discover available IP assets, quickly confirm terms of use, and complete payments within a pre-set legal framework.
This system helps AI developers avoid the gray area of data crawling, while providing IP holders with an efficient monetization channel.
Removing barriers for IP holders
Another major advantage of Story is that even individuals and organizations that lack IP legal expertise can tokenize their assets and protect their assets from unauthorized use or other infringements.
By simplifying the operational process, Story makes the tokenization of IP assets more convenient, greatly lowering the entry threshold and enabling more people to use blockchain technology to achieve IP protection and maximize profits.
This simplified approach is very attractive to different types of IP asset holders. For example, independent creators can quickly transform their IP assets into profitable digital assets.
From startups to established tech companies, innovators and technologists can use Story to protect their patents, software, and product designs, while reducing the risk of infringement through automated execution of on-chain smart contracts and exploring a variety of monetization methods, such as fragmented property rights transactions or limited-time authorizations.
Universities and research institutions can use Story to tokenize databases, research results, and experimental methods, which can not only establish a transparent authorization system, but also more easily facilitate scientific research cooperation or commercial applications without having to deal with the complex details of traditional IP contracts.
For large IP asset holders such as brands and enterprises, Story provides an efficient IP asset management solution, making cross-chain and cross-platform IP applications more convenient. Enterprises no longer need to manage a large number of scattered licensing agreements, nor do they need to switch back and forth between multiple networks. Instead, they can integrate IP assets on a unified platform and rely on Story's reliable legal mechanisms and transaction guarantees to achieve safer and more efficient management.
Through these features, Story has significantly lowered the technical and legal barriers to IP asset protection and monetization, allowing individual creators, research institutions and even large enterprises to integrate into this ecosystem with confidence and manage and protect their IP assets more efficiently.
Chapter 3: Story Technology Overview
The main components of a Story
Relying on a specialized technical architecture, Story is designed to handle large-scale and complex IP asset relationships, and is particularly suitable for AI systems to process massive tokenized databases.
Story uses advanced data structures such as IP Graph and modular smart contract logic to achieve precise and automated processing of IP asset authorization, royalty distribution and dispute resolution.
As mentioned above, Story consists of three core components, each of which provides solutions to different problems in the IP asset lifecycle.
Source: Story
Story L1
Story L1 is the infrastructure layer of the protocol, using an EVM-compatible execution environment and combined with the CometBFT consensus mechanism to achieve efficient transaction confirmation. However, the core feature of L1 is its ability to handle complex IP asset relationships, a capability also known as "IP Graph".
IP Graph and Class Vector Database Query
Story uses custom precompiles and indexing techniques to track complex upstream and downstream or derivative relationships in the IP Graph. Unlike the traditional way of registering tokenized IP assets as static NFTs, Story's ledger structure allows for fast queries and advanced retrieval in a potentially large derivative network.
This feature is critical for AI applications, as an image, database, or piece of text may have multiple parent assets, each of which requires some form of royalty distribution or identification attribution.
In actual applications, Story uses a vector database-like technology and optimizes it for on-chain use, making it possible to quickly trace and traverse multi-level IP assets.
AI developers can therefore automatically identify which parent IP elements are embedded in the database through programs, calculate the corresponding royalty obligations, and check whether a derivative chain is subject to specific terms of use.
This specially designed data structure enables Story to no longer focus solely on traditional throughput indicators such as TPS (transactions per second), but instead turn to providing customized functional support for the AI era.
Proof of Creativity (PoC)
The Proof-of-Creativity Protocol (PoC) is built on Story L1. It defines the IP tokenization and licensing methods and regulates the flow of royalties on and off the chain.
PoC is often referred to as the “operating system” of IP assets. Its main functions include:
Tokenization Rules
Ensure that each IP asset is minted, represented and identified following standard metadata definitions, such as asset category or terms of use.
Modular architecture of proxy flows
The plug-in architecture supports flexible expansion of various modules (such as authorization, disputes or royalty distribution).
This feature is particularly important for transactions between AI agents, as readable contract modules allow agents to autonomously negotiate or verify the terms of use of IP assets.
Programmable royalty distribution and on-chain dispute resolution
Contains automatic royalty distribution logic, suitable for complex derivative chains.
If an AI creation refers to several parent IP assets, PoC will distribute the revenue to each parent asset in proportion according to the terms preset by its parent IP holder. At the same time, the protocol has a dedicated dispute handling function that can mark AI abuse or unauthorized derivatives and suspend their use until the dispute is resolved or escalated to the legal level of PIL.
The modular design of the PoC ensures continuous iteration of the protocol without requiring a wholesale rebuild of the entire system. When new AI-specific modules are needed, such as to verify synthetic content or enforce specific usage restrictions, they can be seamlessly integrated into the PoC.
Programmable IP License (PIL)
Programmable IP License (PIL) is responsible for the programmable management of tokenized IP assets on the chain, while PIL is an off-chain legal framework used to connect the traditional real-world legal system.
By providing standardized terms, referencing recognized legal standards, and providing clear legal recourse when the Story ecosystem’s on-chain solutions are insufficient, PIL ensures that all IP asset transactions (including minting, licensing, and transfers) have corresponding legal effect off-chain.
Because PoC automates on-chain mechanisms, when PoC automatically executes on-chain royalty distribution or generates sub-authorizations for AI models, PIL can ensure that these smart contract obligations remain valid in court, and the relevant on-chain transaction history can be used as litigation evidence.
PIL is particularly critical for resolving large-scale IP disputes or cross-border IP disputes. Without PIL, the ownership and copyright recorded on the chain may not fully match traditional IP regulations, making it difficult to obtain legal recognition.
PIL practical use case analysis
Suppose an independent data provider casts its data into an IP asset on Story and plans to license it to AI developers.
The vendor can set an upfront licensing fee, as well as an ongoing revenue share tied to future AI model output.
Whenever an AI developer initiates a transaction on Story L1 to integrate a data provider’s IP assets into its AI model, the licensing module will refer to PIL and automatically encode the relevant fee and royalty distribution logic in the PoC.
If the AI developer later sells an application that relies on the IP asset, he will need to distribute part of the proceeds to the original IP holder.
If he fails to fulfill this obligation, the IP holder can initiate the on-chain dispute resolution mechanism. If the dispute cannot be resolved, for example, the developer transfers the activity to the off-chain or loses contact, the IP holder can still file a lawsuit in the relevant jurisdiction based on PIL.
The combination of Story L1, PoC and PIL enables Story to provide a complete ecosystem for IP asset registration, authorization and execution.
IP Assets & IP Accounts
In the Story ecosystem, IP assets and IP accounts are two core concepts.
IP assets are ERC-721 tokens that represent tokenized IP on the chain.
IP assets remain dynamically connected to Story’s on-chain modules so they can respond to external calls, which is critical for AI use cases, especially the large number of micro-authorization events that may occur when AI models are iterating.
Each IP asset can be linked to its parent or child assets, building a graph that helps track asset lineage. When the AI output involves multiple IP assets, IP Graph ensures that all relevant parent assets are identified, simplifying royalty calculations for multiple parties.
This capability is critical for large AI models that rely on entire content repositories because it helps ensure compliance and enhances trust.
Since IP assets are bound to an IP account (smart contract account), they can have built-in modules and be customized and managed as needed.
Source: Story
The IP account is a modified implementation of the ERC-6551 standard, essentially acting as the “brain” of each IP asset, controlling the module operations of these assets and enabling communication with external smart contracts.
Modules
Modules are independent smart contracts that are responsible for defining operations within the Story ecosystem. Core modules include:
Authorization Module
This module creates specialized IP assets and sets specific terms of use for the licensor (such as commercial or non-commercial use). AI frameworks can call this module for large-scale IP asset use, whether for quantitative analysis, financial modeling, data insights, or general AI model training.
Royalty Module
This module automatically handles the royalty distribution of derivative works, especially for AI-generated content covering multiple parent IP assets, distributing revenues in proportion according to preset rules.
Dispute Module
This module is used to flag potential infringements, suspend the use of disputed assets, or submit disputes to off-chain arbitration if necessary. If there is misuse of IP assets or unauthorized derivative works, this module provides a trustless solution on the chain to avoid directly entering traditional legal proceedings.
Future Modules
The extensibility of the system allows easy addition of new modules, such as partial IP segmentation or Agent TCP/IP plugins for interaction between AI agents.
By breaking down IP operations into independent modules, Story ensures that feature updates and new functionality can be easily added, providing an open environment for continuous innovation.
Chapter 4: Use Cases for Story
Stakeholders in the IP Ecosystem
As a multi-functional platform, Story provides programmable IP asset custody services, promoting an ecosystem of a wide range of IP holders, including AI practitioners and researchers. Each group benefits from on-chain programmable IP capabilities in different ways.
Key stakeholders include:
IP creators - want direct control over licensing and revenue.
Large IP holders - plan to consolidate large-scale IP portfolios into a single platform for management.
AI developers — finding easy ways to use tokenized databases.
Users - eager to create secondary works based on existing IPs.
Developers - Build user-oriented dApps to achieve secondary creation of IP.
Together, these stakeholders form a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle—more IP asset creation leads to more derivative IP assets, which in turn leads to more licensing deals, thus enriching Story’s IP repository.
This section will explore the various ecosystem implementations and projects that Story supports.
AI Models, Agents, and Frameworks
Story's most notable applications are in the field of AI.
For example, when an AI developer wants to integrate a specific database into its AI model, the Story system can confirm whether the IP holder has enabled royalty and derivative licenses for that database.
If the developer decides to use the IP asset in its model and generates commercially viable content, Story's mechanism will automatically trigger the corresponding royalty flow to ensure that the IP holder receives the compensation they deserve.
When AI developers need tens of thousands of databases, they can rely on Story's universal IP repository to handle large-scale requests without having to issue separate licensing agreements with tens of thousands of small IP holders. This frictionless approach greatly broadens the scope of application of tokenized databases.
Emerging AI agent frameworks can further leverage Story’s modular architecture. For example, through Agent TCP/IP, AI agents can discover specialized IP assets related to their specific domains, and then automatically negotiate usage terms and execute royalty payments through the on-chain licensing module.
Story will record the expansion of derivative works in real time, ensuring that multiple parent IP holders can obtain revenue sharing in real time.
All this portends a future where AI systems become active participants in the IP economy, autonomously generating derivative works and distributing royalties proportionally, without the need for human intervention.
IPFi — DeFi for IP
IPFi is a new concept similar to DeFi. However, instead of limiting financial activities to traditional on-chain collateral assets (such as ETH or stablecoins), it utilizes intangible IP assets.
This allows IP holders to pledge, loan, or mortgage their IP assets, creating various DeFi-like opportunities that were previously only available to homogeneous tokens.
The stable revenue streams from on-chain licensing and derivative works can provide continuous income for IP assets. These on-chain revenue streams can be used as financial support to form automated revenue strategies or packaged into advanced derivative financial products.
As the world's largest asset class, IPFi is expected to greatly expand the total addressable market (TAM) of DeFi and programmable blockchains. IP holders who have never participated in traditional DeFi before now have a direct motivation to tokenize their IP assets, and DeFi users can also access non-traditional collateral assets.
By combining programmable IP with DeFi primitives, IPFi lays the foundation for building a more inclusive and diverse on-chain economy, which is not limited to DeFi native participants, but also includes large enterprises, scientific research laboratories, and even small businesses seeking to monetize untapped IP.
Enterprise Applications
While large studios and conglomerates are able to handle high-value IP transactions, they miss out on many monetization opportunities in the long-tail transaction market.
With the emergence of AI, it has made millions of high-quality derivative works possible, and the existing licensing structure of large corporate groups cannot keep up with these changes. With near-zero-cost IP licensing, derivative work tracking, and automated revenue distribution, Story opens up a new paradigm for the monetization and expansion of IP assets.
A typical example is Story’s collaboration with Stability AI, the developer of Stable Diffusion, one of the most famous open source text-to-image models currently available.
Typically, reaching agreements for enterprise-level IP and AI requires cumbersome legal processes, especially when it involves complex use of large-scale data, which makes it more difficult to address the growing long tail of IP in commercial use, such as niche AI image generators, derivative databases, or small specialized models that only require fragments of large-scale corpora.
By integrating Stable Diffusion into Story, IP holders can set detailed terms for the use and derivatives of their IP assets, while enjoying features such as automated revenue sharing and real-time usage tracking.
Each newly generated image content that references an IP asset is recorded on the chain, storing its metadata, such as its parent asset, hierarchical relationship, and applicable royalty obligations. This means that companies do not need to negotiate licensing for each potential AI application separately, but can rely on Story's programmable IP modules to execute or update their usage rights at scale.
From a business perspective, this model allows large enterprises, data providers, or AI labs to conduct extensive generative AI exploration without consuming excessive legal resources.
At the same time, this provides a convenient way for small businesses or independent developers to quickly license and integrate large enterprise IP and integrate it into their own AI applications.
In other words, the cooperation between Story and Stability AI provides an on-chain environment that replaces cumbersome one-time agreements, and connects IP assets with AI work needs through a unified authorization and monetization mechanism to form an efficient ecosystem. For enterprises, this transparent and automated process can help them capture every incremental revenue.
In summary, the collaboration with Stability AI positions Story to become a pillar in data-intensive industries, providing an enterprise-grade platform that simplifies the processes of derivative tracking, royalty distribution, and licensing management to support large-scale AI applications.
Story Ecosystem
A major feature of the Story ecosystem is that it greatly lowers the threshold for developers to create innovative IP applications.
Since every IP asset can be found in a global, easily searchable IP repository, dApps can easily integrate advanced licensing and derivative capabilities at almost no additional cost.
Aria is a project in the Story ecosystem that uses Story's IP repository to tokenize cultural IP (such as music copyrights, film copyrights, and important works of art) into programmable IP assets.
This approach not only bridges the gap between culture and finance, but also enables fans, investors, and IP creators to own and profit from cultural IP in an unprecedented way. It provides a new source of income for IP creators and holders, while also allowing fans and investors to share in the profits of their favorite IPs.
Mahojin is a typical project in the Story ecosystem. It uses AI algorithms to generate derivative works from existing IP assets. Whenever Mahojin touches an IP asset, it queries Story's repository to verify its applicable licensing terms.
If its terms allow commercial use, Mahojin’s AI can generate derivative works in different modes and automatically calculate the royalty distribution to the parent IP holder.
This approach avoids the hassle of negotiation and ensures that every contributor, whether a creator or an indirect parent IP asset, receives a fair share of revenue.
Mahojin is an example of the Story ecosystem’s gradual move toward agent-driven flows. In some cases, these flows are not triggered by humans, but automatically by AI agents.
Relying on Story, Mahojin does not need to redesign the dispute module, authorization logic or royalty calculation mechanism. Instead, it can directly call the standardized modules shared by the ecosystem, reducing the compliance burden on Mahojin developers and IP holders.
Ablo is an application that allows users to use AI to create derivative works of different well-known brand IPs.
On Ablo, anyone can use Ablo's AI tools to create derivative works of IP based on brand-licensed templates and release co-branded products. As a well-known brand IP center, the platform allows anyone to use IP like building Lego, while brands can set corresponding rules on how to use their IP. This allows users of different skill levels to use AI to generate unique designs, apply them to clothing and share them with others.
Normally, it would involve numerous contracts, negotiations, and legal declarations for each brand a user wants to collaborate with, but with Story’s global IP repository, Ablo only needs to identify available IP assets, check their terms of use, and pay the relevant fees and royalties on-chain.
If a dispute arises, such as a developer using unauthorized derivative IP assets, the ecosystem’s built-in dispute module will automatically kick in, flagging the infringing derivative IP and suspending its further use until the dispute is resolved.
Additionally, because Story automatically manages the ownership chain and traceability of each IP asset, such conflicts are easier to detect and resolve.
In addition to direct licensing, Ablo also supports aggregation capabilities, allowing multiple smaller IP holders to bundle their assets into curated packages and then collectively license them to larger gaming projects.
The fourth example is Sekai , which demonstrates the potential of the Story ecosystem for large-scale community-driven “universe building”.
Sekai provides a platform that allows multiple IP holders to contribute to storylines, characters, and background stories, and each contribution is cast as an IP asset. A virtual universe can therefore accumulate more than 10,000 IP assets.
Since these assets exist in the Story ecosystem, whenever a new derivative work is created, the system automatically identifies its parent asset. If a user in Sekai combines multiple IP assets into a new series of derivative works, Story will automatically set the correct revenue distribution to ensure that each relevant IP holder can get the benefits they deserve.
Some IP holders may allow their IP to be used unconditionally, while others may charge a small fee and prefer that their IP be used only under certain conditions.
The net effect is an ever-expanding universe of collaboration where IP holders can be confident that their contributions will be recognized and monetized appropriately, while IP creators can quickly build upon existing contexts.
In addition to human-centric dApps, several well-known AI agent frameworks, including Virtuals' GAME, Zerebro's ZerePy, and ai16z's Eliza, are also integrating with Story to enable automated IP trading between AI agents, allowing AI agents to exchange or optimize data in real time.
Through Agent TCP/IP, these frameworks enable AI Agents to seamlessly locate and license IP assets from Story’s repository.
For example, a GAME agent can access specialized databases required for advanced simulations; while an Eliza-based agent may integrate multiple on-chain research assets when performing analysis and "talk" to other agents to share their derived insights or code.
In each case, Story’s licensing and royalties module autonomously tracks asset usage, ensuring that each parent IP holder is paid fairly, no matter how many times an asset is remixed or combined.
This frictionless IP exchange between AI agents expands the economic possibilities for AI developers and IP holders. Knowledge, data, and royalties can flow autonomously between AI agents on a large scale, shaping a machine-driven IP economy.
Source: The Block Pro Research
While many existing dApps focus on human IP creators, Story’s ecosystem development also actively considers the needs of AI agents.
The open source framework can access Story to enable direct licensing, allowing autonomous AI agents to request/license the use of IP assets on behalf of human operators or even on behalf of other AI agents.
If an agent is designed to fetch high-quality images for a dedicated AI model, it can seamlessly browse the Story repository, select relevant IP assets, and use them through micropayments.
In more complex application scenarios, these AI agents may generate derivative IPs after optimizing or fusing multiple IP inputs. Story’s modular architecture and built-in dispute resolution mechanism fully support this agent-driven process. Therefore, when an agent abuses authorized IP data, the on-chain complaint mechanism can instantly freeze the infringing derivative works or readjust the flow of royalties.
Chapter 5: Conclusion
With Story’s building blocks, including programmable IP, an open network, a framework that connects code and law, and a growing ecosystem, the next generation of tokenized databases is poised for unprecedented explosive growth.
By focusing on interfacing with AI, Story lays the foundation for a self-reinforcing cycle, in which each new project onboards demonstrates the platform’s potential and drives more IP holders to join the IP tokenization movement.
At the same time, as AI application scenarios become more diverse, the economic demand for a sound IP infrastructure is also increasing. AI model builders need a reliable tokenized database channel for training, and IP holders need to ensure that the use of their data is fairly compensated.
Story provides such a unified platform that can connect different media and ensure that the booming development of AI becomes a huge opportunity for IP holders rather than a threat.
Just as NVIDIA has established its dominance in AI computing, Story is also committed to becoming the "NVIDIA" in the field of intellectual property (IP). If NVIDIA's hardware innovation solves the computing bottleneck of AI, then Story solves the next key bottleneck in the AI era: access to and management of high-quality data and IP.
By building a unified on-chain IP asset repository, Story aims to reshape the data ownership and traceability mechanism. Just as NVIDIA promotes AI transformation through GPU acceleration, Story will become an indispensable link in the AI value chain.
